


of the giant planets and the central luminary (pt ii)

by inkspl0tches



Series: the sprite universe [2]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Gen, shrug emoji
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 21:39:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15805098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: On the last and final day, God created little girls. On the last and final day, from Scully’s true rib on her right side, God created daughters without mothers and mothers without sons and so on and so forth. Amen Amen Hallelejuah.--prompt from @enigmaticdr on tumblr: AU post-2012, dystopian, a hardened Mulder and Scully find an abandoned child at the side of the road.





	of the giant planets and the central luminary (pt ii)

**Author's Note:**

> [a non-linear, non-sensical addition to the sprite universe. yes, you do have to have read that one first. no, this is probably not gonna all your questions. because @enigmaticdr asked and @thexfiles helped, ofc]

**1.**

On the last and final day, God created little girls. On the last and final day, from Scully’s true rib on her right side, God created daughters without mothers and mothers without sons and so on and so forth. Amen Amen Hallelejuah.

On the last and final day, after there was light, God broke the mother and pieced her back together to create long dead California sea children and quiet, unexpected Sprites.

And maybe Scully’s scripture doesn’t read that way, but Mulder has seen both their faces slack in sleep. He has looked at the parallel curves of their sharp, jutted chins when they frown.

He has seen. And he knows what he believes.

**2.**

Eight months since the dying gasps of their house smoked out an empty sky. Just shy of the length of time it takes to grow a new life. The earth is heavy with a round, phantom weight. If it is growing something, deep in its protective, watery embrace, it does not want anyone to know. The clouds drift and tug, slow, slow, but the stars do not come back. It never rains.

— We should call her Eve.

He’s joking. Mostly. Besides the Sprite, flat on her back, her little face turned skyward, they haven’t seen any other people. Eight months and the earth plays its cards close to its chest.

Scully rolls her eyes.

— In the name of digitalis, Mulder, we are not calling her Eve.

— Amen, g-woman.

So she is Evie instead. But only sometimes.

She’s Evie, but only when she’s tearing off the side of dirt roads into patches of things so thick with thorns it makes Scully’s voice snap and reverberate across the dry wash. _Stop!_

The Sprite is the only person Mulder has ever met who is not in the least afraid of Scully.

She disappears beside the road, leaving Scully standing with her hands on her hips. If Scully had yelled Will’s name like that, hard, angry, afraid, he would have been down the stairs from his room as fast as he could take them, three at a time. Mulder thinks about asking her to say it now, or just every so often. To see if it brings him back. See if it brings him down.

Instead, they wait. If they go after her, the Sprite, she thinks it’s funny to run. The two very best searchers this side of the Mason-Dixon line, handed down the one little girl they can’t go looking for. That irony survived the turning over of the world order, the veiny green underside of this new leaf, is almost obscene.

But the thing about the Sprite is she seems born into this in a way no one else was. It’s maybe her childhood resilience, her four-year-old malleability. The way all children seem to break themselves to grow. It’s that or it’s — but he doesn’t think about it. It doesn’t matter. What matters is this: Either way, she scrambles back up onto the road in a moment or two, victorious, holding a sticky red handful of something in the air and grinning.

Scully frowns at her, sitting cross-legged on the side of the road. There is a grief deeper than worry scratched into the lines around her mouth.

“You think you run the world, huh,” she says as the Sprite makes her way towards them. It is sharper than maybe she would like it to sound. The kind of thing she would have said to William, before, but with a real smile. The road dust turns her sepia and older. Mulder draws a line in the sand with a sharp stick. “Think you can just do whatever you want.”

The Sprite tilts her head, raises both her little eyebrows like she doesn’t understand, which they all know isn’t true. She doesn’t talk much, but when she does it is long and lyrical—is sometimes in perfect iambic pentameter. A heartbeat rhythm right out of her little pink mouth. Ba-boom.

“I know you heard me,” Scully says. “You don’t listen.”

The Sprite looks up at Mulder and grins. There is a gap between her front teeth and one is loose, crooked. He nods, even though he’s not sure what she wants permission to do. Looking back at Scully, she gets right up close, until they’re eye-to-eye, their foreheads nearly touching.

She brings up her little fist and opens her hand splayed against Scully’s mouth and chin. There are smears of wild strawberries down to her elbow. She leaves a sticky-sweet strawberry-summer-jam five-star against Scully’s lips. Scully, who is still frowning. Scully, who opens her mouth to lick her lips, slowly, and almost smiles.

The Sprite is the only person Mulder has ever met who is not in the least afraid of Scully. She leans in closer, her red hair lost and tangled in with Scully’s, identical in the late afternoon light, and whispers something he can’t hear.

Ba-boom.

 

**3.**

The Sprite does not wear shoes.

At Scully’s insistence, she’ll sometimes wear big white gym socks they can get in packs from empty Exxon’s, turning them red with road dust, or black with asphalt and dirt. She has an uncanny ability to avoid sharp rocks and deep depressions. She exclusively drinks apple juice and wears Mulder’s t-shirts like dresses. She loses that front tooth while bouncing her heels off the wall of an empty hotel pool. She tugs at Scully’s hem, and places the little scrap of childhood bone carefully, firmly in her palm.

Once, weeks after they found her, Scully asks what she was doing, lying out there in the field. Asks if she’d gotten lost. If she knows where her parents are. Asks what she was looking at, under that big old Ferris wheel, all by herself.

The Sprite squints at her like she doesn’t understand. She says, very simply, “The big sky.”

 

**4.**

This new world makes its own patterns. On every third day, they are flocked by a murder of crows.

The Sprite rides tall on Mulder’s back, all of them sick of driving. They move just to move, just to stay ahead of themselves. It’s warm, but not hot, and the trees above them provide shade in patterns, offering surprise parties of pure light in sudden patches. The Sprite stretches out her skinny little arm in these places and watches the shadows play across her wrist and inner elbow. The dark silhouettes of birds duck and dive.

“Bird,” the Sprite says softly.

“Yes, baby. Crows.”

Scully is hiking next to them with her fingers hooked gently around his. Occasionally, she’ll reach out and swat a mosquito away from the Sprite’s ankle, run her finger gently along her instep until she squirms.

“A murder of crows,” Mulder says.

The bird shadows collect above them into a permanent, rustling shade. The Sprite pats at his cheek, which generally means she wants him to explain.

“A murder of crows means a big group of those birds, kiddo.”

The Sprite nods, her sharp Scully-chin digging into his shoulder. After the world ends, everything they do is a little like autopsy. A little like digging up something old and making it talk. A little like granting bones language. This world, with its crows and its absence of bodies, it writes canons. The Sprite will never know a murder without wings.

He looks down at Scully, who is so familiar against dark trees, biting her lip and pushing at her long hair.  

“A damning of jurors,” she offers quietly, half to herself.

Mulder smiles. “A parliament of owls.”

Scully volleys back, “An incredulity of cuckolds.”

They used to do this sort of thing on road trips. So familiar against dark trees, his Scully. There are some patterns that are like runes. There are some things so ancient and bruised that they fool time completely, even when it sheds its skin.

“A misbelief of painters,” he says, and draws his finger down the side of her cheek like a brush.

 

**5.**

The absence of death pricks at Scully.

When Will was just a baby, maybe three, Scully had brought him into work to do a last minute autopsy, left him sleeping in the empty locker room. When she’d gone to shower, she’d come back to an empty cot. Come back to her toddler sitting on the floor of the exam room, dark head tilted back to look up at the bloated body of Edward L. Monter, recent victim of a gunshot wound to the gut.  

He was curious, not afraid. He’d gotten into the habit lately of pointing at various people with identifiable traits or uniforms–tall men, old women, firemen, the priest at his grandmother’s church– and saying,  _Me?_  It was more a question of the future than anything else. An interrogation of something that did not exist.

 _No, baby,_  she’d said then, picking him up to smell the way he smelled not like the morgue. Not like Purell and iodine. The way he smelled like gentle detergent and his father. She’d zipped the black body bag with her free hand.  _Not you. Not ever._

But still, when they, when anyone, thought about the End of The World, they thought of pestilence and fever. Death and decay. A vision of roadkill, widespread, where bodies rotted and survivors blinked and prayed.

They never thought about a squalid emptiness. An absence so intense it has presence, has weight (round, full) and taste (pine, bitter mint, cold, dusty air).

No one died–they just simply disappeared. One day, they woke up, and the world had moved right on without them. One day, they woke up, and it was like in those books Will used to love in fifth grade: The world is quiet here.

One day, they woke up, and William—their miracle, their secret, inexplicable, magical little boy—was what they’d always hoped he would be.

One day, they woke up, and their son was just like everybody else.

 

**6.**

Still. There’s no such thing now as a law of absolutes. And so in the green of Appalachia, they find living, shell-shocked deer, and dead women and Scully covers the Sprite’s eyes. In the grey space of another motel parking lot, they think they see the flicker of an attendant, ducking in and out of shadows, unwilling to abandon her post. In the swamp heat of Missouri, they find recently and temporarily abandoned rollerblades, clean and white.

And sitting on top of a green flaked picnic table outside a gas station in Dothan, swinging her shoeless feet, the Sprite finds a woman dressed all in blue.

They’re wandering through the snack aisle, picking out cans of Spaghetti-Os and impenetrable juice boxes when Scully freezes.

“Hey.” Mulder touches her shoulder. “What is it?”

She looks at him, eyes wide, and brings a finger to her lips. He listens. From outside, through the window they broke, he can hear the Sprite’s high little rhythmic voice. Answering questions or posing them.

And then there is another voice, deeper. A call and response. Scully tears out of the aisle and metal cans roll on the tile floor. He wonders about a hidden incline, something they can’t feel or see. A force that pulled for everyone except them. Them, and the Sprite. The cans all hit the far wall and ring like wind chimes.

They’d left their pistols in the car—there was little use for them in an empty world of dark birds and skittish deer. She grabs for what’s closest, a double-barreled shotgun resting heavy on the counter.

Outside, there is the Sprite and the break in the pattern she’s found. Or that found her. A tall woman, with grey hair in long braids, stands across the dry lot. She is facing the Sprite, her head tilted, considering. She is not willowy or half in shadow. Her feet are firmly planted.

Mulder is so stunned by her very existence, her intrusion, that for a moment he can do nothing except stare, stopped up behind Scully. Scully, who has felt in her bones since she burnt down the house that if she’d been faster smarter quicker braver she’d have her son and not this elusive little girl, who clings and never cries. Scully, who levels the gun immediately and speaks low.

“Step away from her.”

The woman, her blue dress hanging off her shoulders, hunches up in surprises and turns slowly to face them. Her face is round and flat, unremarkable. Her eyes are dark and bright. She laughs and it deepens the lines in her cheeks. “Trust me, I don’t want to be any closer than this.”

Mulder swallows. “Evie, come here.”

The Sprite blinks in surprise. For the first time, she seems to sense the sharp pricking of their fear and actually heed its sting. She freezes on the table, puts her fingers in her mouth and suddenly begins to cry. Heaving four-year-old sobs make her whole body shake.

Scully zeroes in on the woman, takes a lurching step forward. The sound of the gun cocking is loud and hollow. “I said to step the fuck back.”

The woman nods. “Gladly, gladly.” She takes slow steps away from the picnic table and the Sprite comes scrambling off its hard top. Mulder catches her up off the ground, palming the back of her head, turning her face from Scully and the shotgun and the woman in blue.

“Let’s go, Scully.” The Sprite wipes her face on his shirt. She looks at Scully with her eyes big, her mouth open and quiet. Scully doesn’t turn. “Scully,” he presses. “Let’s go.”

“She’s just a child,” Scully is saying, almost too quiet, and he has no idea why she’s saying it at all, except for the careful way the woman had stepped away, her eyes on the Sprite and not the gun. Like there was only one thing she was scared of and Scully wasn’t it. “She’s just a little girl.”

The woman grins, dazed and toothless, as she backs into the crop of trees off the side of the lot, away from them. “Beg your pardon, ma’am,” she sniffs, wipes her wrist across her mouth, leaving a hard line instead of a smile in its wake. “But you have no idea what she is.”

Scully fires three times into the copse of trees and hits nothing. Her shoulders snap with the recoil. The Sprite covers her ears, sobs again, but does not scream.

 

**7.**

In some places, streetlamps still buzz-click-hiss to life when the sun goes down. It is  _lonely_  to watch. Stark and skinny and strange and utterly stupid, the tall lights coming on to illuminate silent streets and dead lots.

And Mulder can only think, God. They have no idea.

After Dothan, they drive for seventy-miles and stop at a motel whose streetlights have all been informed of the news. Who are dead and dumb and leave the lot so dark that the black sky looks blue. They stop at a motel with no stairs up to the rooms, no covered wooden porches, and Mulder puts a sleeping Sprite to bed. Scully sits on the slab of concrete outside the room in a white plastic chair and waits, waits, waits for the lights to not come on.

Mulder brings her a lukewarm bottle of Topo-Chico. Closes the door behind him, but not all the way. There is a second white chair next to Scully’s and she’s pulled it closer to her, leaned her thin wrist, palm up, over its skinny plastic arm. He covers her hand with his when he sits. She curls her fingers.

“Would you have shot her?” He keeps quiet. So as not to wake the baby. So as not to wake Scully.

When it was dark like this, without streetlamp light, she would talk to him. The air crackles with peripheral sound and it takes him a moment to realize it is cicadas. The latest things to come back. To emerge. It’s inching towards nine months since. Some things have been reborn.

Scully sips her drink, nods hard. “Yes.”

He had never understood this about her, even before. Her instinct to kill a thing to know it better, or not to know it at all. “Why?”

She shakes her head,  staring straight ahead, scoffs in her throat. “That’s stupid, Mulder. You know why. Something else.”

The sound of the insects reminds him of their low-slung porch. Their buzzy, inconsistent outdoor lights. The uneven tread of wood where Will had gashed his knee when he was five. Their broken railing and blue, blue chairs.

His voice catches. “Did you mean to do it?”

“Mean to do what?” Scully is still looking straight ahead, eyes level with the blue-black bruise of the skyline as it blurs into the trees.

Blue, blue chairs and citronella. Will curled up in Scully’s arms. The snap of a firefly. The long, deep sigh of their empty fields.

“Burn down our house.”

Scully presses her lips together. She shifts her hand under his and weaves their fingers together. “No,” she whispers.

There is a prick behind his eyes like he’s going to cry. He squeezes her hand and she looks at him. She’s been chewing at her lip and there is a smear of blood there, thin and dark.

Scully brings his hand to her mouth, pressing a kiss to a scar below his knuckle. He imagines he can feel the hot press of her blood, Imagines it feels red.

“I meant to burn down everything,” she says. “Us. The whole world.”

 

**8.**

One final question. When they’re back inside. Scully disappears into the bathroom to steal the Sprite from her makeshift bed, lays her down carefully between them.

“Do you think about it?”

She doesn’t ask for clarification. What the woman had said. What she is. She meets his eyes over the Sprite’s head. Their hands overlap on her little stomach, feel the easy rise and fall of her, the minute expanse of her bird ribs.

“I don’t think about what,” she whispers slowly, serious, considering. “I think about who.”

She could break his heart. Scully. His skeptic to the last. She could be Ben Franklin, standing in the middle of the lightning storm. She could be struck with pure electricity, right through, and she’d say  _Again, again. I need to see it again._  He would love her anywhere. On their old porch and in smoking fields and lightless parking lots.

“Look at her,” he says.

Scully squints at him. “Mulder, I look at her every day.”

“No, you don’t. Not really.”

Scully looks past the Sprite. As often as she can. He pulls his hand away from her sleeping body and palms Scully’s cheek. “Just for a minute. It’s okay.”

It might not be. Emily was so long ago, but the ghosts of little girls live out in the opposite of dog years, in car mirrors. They’re always closer than you expect. The sea could eat them away and still, still—

“Oh my god, Mulder.” Scully’s voice is strained, choked. “She looks like–”

Finally. He moves his hand to her shoulder, tracing up to the base of her neck. “I know, Scully, I know.”

In sleep, the Sprite has turned towards her mother, is holding the edge of her t-shirt in a little fist and Scully absently traces her knuckles with a pointer. She is breathless when she looks up, her eyes reflecting in the dark. Breathless when she finishes: “Like you, Mulder. She looks like you.”

And in the morning, the Sprite does have the set of his jaw, the outlines of his nose, in miniature. In the morning, the Sprite wakes up and has instructions. Says, you have to go get him. In the morning, she is pointing them further South. In the morning, she is theirs. In the morning, she is a Compass Rose.

 

**9.**

Nine months. The belly of the earth cracks open wide. It rains in the middle of the desert for three days from clear, empty skies. When it stops, there are worms and swallows and a stray tabby cat. When it stops, amongst the life and green, there is a respectful, sudden sense of deeper quiet. Of what it means to raise things again.

As they drive, fast with the windows down, parallel rivulets of blood drip from the Sprite’s nose. Scully is horrified. Scully is making up nonsense diagnoses, is saying, “It’s the altitude. Does your head hurt, baby?”

But the Sprite seems unperturbed. Seems healthy and strong and maybe excited. “I don’t know how he talks to me,” she says, in response to no spoken question, curled up in Scully’s lap, head on her chest in the passenger seat. Scully strokes her hair in an uneven, anxious rhythm. The Sprite smiles, pulling a red Kleenex away from her face. “I don’t know everything. I only know some things.”

Mulder takes a hand off the wheel to squeeze her big gym socked foot. “That’s okay, honey. You don’t have to know.”

The Sprite nods. Then grins again. “I know one more thing.”

The road outside is purple as the sun goes down. He is glad for the absence of clouds but wishes for stars. A guiding light by which to find his son. Polaris or Orion’s belt, slipped off and flung out, a straight line for once, for once.

The Sprite’s voice is clear and sweet. “He calls me Leia. You ‘member? Like in the wars." 

"I remember.”

Months ago. George Lucas in a white tiled bathroom. Scully sobbing against a yellow papered wall. The Sprite repeating words as he said them, following along. Bespin.  _Best Pin_. The City in the Clouds. Where the Princess finds her brother. Because he needs saving. Because she  _hears_ him.

_Mulder!_

Scully’s voice is sudden and sharp beside him. He whips his head around to look at her. He calls her fucking Leia, Scully, our son calls–  
But she and the Sprite are looking out the windshield with twin intensity. Looking at the violet of the coming dark. Scully raises her hand and points.  _Oh, my god._

Ahead of them, the evening sky lightens in streaks and whirls and lines.

Ahead of them, the stars come back, slow.


End file.
